Best 4189 quotes in «military quotes» category

The service members who defend our way of life ask very little in return, but they deserve teachers who will be as relentless in teaching their children as the military is in protecting our interests at home and abroad.

the shooting and killing weren’t as black-and-white as most people think. The actions live in that hazy area of blown-apart stone walls and hesitations. Sometimes I shot when I shouldn’t have; other times I didn’t shoot when I should have. There was no way to explain why I did either. Everything happened so fast. Decisions had to be made. After I got home I began to see things in slow motion, see the actions that might’ve been mistakes.

The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment.

The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going onto Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, although it was common knowledge that the ChronoGuard was SO-12 and Antiterrorism SO-9. It is rumored that SO-1 was the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. Quite what the others do is anyone's guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and slightly unbalanced. 'If you want to be a SpecOp,' the saying goes, 'act kinda weird...

The step is small and suddenly I'm aware of how close we are. Close enough that I can smell the smoky sweetness of coffee beans on him. "That does not smell like the coffee that's in the mess. Contraband?" He chuckles. "I grind my own. It's one of the lessons my dad imparted to me about military life. He was army to the core. And when I left for basic training he said, "always grind your own coffee."" "Is that like a metaphor?" I ask. "No. He literally meant grind my own beans. Basic training coffee sucked." We share a laugh.

The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.

The sun appeared between the twin spires of the cathedral as its light reflected off the crescent and star that rose out of the dome on top of the mosque. It was beautiful, and surreal. In one instant, the bells rang out from the cathedral and if I closed my eyes then I could easily imagine that I was back home in Europe, but in the next, the call to morning prayer sounded from the mosque, and it was a stark reminder of how far away I actually was from my true home.

The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?" "Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!" "I guess that explains their rich military history, then.

The thing about a marine is that they can be the nicest men and women you will ever meet, but when it comes to their duty there are none fiercer.

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence. The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

The way you blunder from one catastrophe to the next, it's a wonder the whole galaxy doesn't hate you. The galaxy is a big place, General. You provincial military types don't get far enough out to really see that. -General Tagon & Captain Kevyn Andreyasn

...the weather was atrocious. A frightful storm burst upon us. We camped literally in water...To cap our woe, there was no means to light a single fire. We had to imagine dinner.

They had a past together. Did it rule out a future?

The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men.

They did what soldiers always do. They improvised.

They were frisky, eager and exuberant, and they had all been friends in the States. They were plainly unthinkable. They were noisy, overconfident, empty-headed kids of twenty-one. They had gone to college and were engaged to pretty, clean girls whose pictures were already standing on the rough cement mantelpiece of Orr's fireplace. They had ridden in speedboats and played tennis. They had been horseback riding. One had once been to bed with an older woman. They knew the same poeple in different parts of the country and had gone to school with each other's cousins.

This discussion of war then lays the foundation for an understanding of change as a process and as an essential component of military affairs. Militaries must change to cope with the changing environment in which they function. The U.S. Army has a robust process to guide change in its combat developments community. Change is also present in the business world, as industry seeks a competitive advantage in order to survive and prosper. The present transformation initiatives in the U.S. Department of Defense seek to maintain the U.S. dominance in military capability in the world and to exploit the opportunities afforded by new technologies and concepts of organization and warfare that use those technologies. The future of military requirements remain a challenge to define. The transformation process tries to define that future and the capabilities needed in order to maintain the security of the United States. Yet enemies of the United States and its allies also seek to predict and mold this future to their advantage. The rise of Islamic fundamentalists or radicalism has changed the global security environment. Western nations must prepare to defeat this threat that is not really new but has risen to new levels of ferocity and lethality. Regardless of the changes in technology, organizational and operational concepts, and external or internal threats, people remain a constant as the crucial element in war. People make decisions to use military and other elements of national power to impose the will of a nation on another group or nations. People also comprise the military services and man the component systems within the services. Any study of war and warfare must address the impact that people make on the conduct of war and the effects of war on people. The political process always includes people. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of that political process. Leaders who make a decision to fight and those who lead those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines into battle must not forget that people implement those decisions and are the object of any offense or defense. Protecting the citizens of the United States is why the nation maintains military forces.

They were worried about keeping military families strong. They were worried about the stress and strain of prolonged military service and how it would affect our military readiness the next time a Hitler-wannabe reared his ugly head. As they made a list of pros and cons for sending families overseas, they never imagined that DOD schools would be the best possible solution to nearly every problem they could envision. The most unpredictable phenomena occurred. The DOD literally created a culture of kids whose life experiences were so rich, yet so different from where they’d come from, that as they grew in years the people they most related to, the people they most wanted to be around, were other military kids who had the same shared experience. Military kids became military members—and they’ve kept us strong, our families, armed forces, our country, all of us.

This is my worst fear. It’s not keeping my students safe from terrorists, it’s knowing what to do when the Chaplain comes to take Johnny out of class because not letting the terrorists win means sometimes the good guys are going to die. And those good guys have kids, and they’re sitting in my classroom.

This indignation builds up an accumulation of anger over the many ways I am being reminded by the system then and now of my inferiority. This gradual anger over one humiliation after another may be hard for men to understand and even women who have not had the need to seek redress from perpetrators and who have been allowed to grow as I did in my youth unhindered, protected from male dominated themes like the military."47 (47 - paraphrased from Gurko, Miriram, The Ladies of Seneca Falls; the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement, 1974.

This is our foxhole, and in foxholes, sometimes faith is all you've got.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.

Those skills were unexplainable, and using them only stirred questions and concerns.

Those of us who work in the field of trauma and abuse, whether psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, doctors, counselors, or psychotherapists, have been provided with beautiful tools for understanding the impact of trauma. We become adept at understanding the dynamic of why the messenger is always shot and broadcast the Bionic insight of why the visionary is not bearable to the group. However, when it comes to military mind control, abuse within religious belief groups or cults, and deliberately created dissociative identity disorder, we enter the least resourced field of all.

Those who boast about honor shouldn't lack in it.

Today, more than 23 million veterans walk among us. Nearly 3 million receive disability compensation, and many more owe their lives to an anonymous corpsman or medic. Millions of Americans and their families are profoundly grateful.

To change one's field of influence is to change the course of one's life.

To have the opportunity to know your parents is to have the opportunity to truly know yourself.

To fall in love twice, with the same person, you need to grow another heart. That's all I do in my secret underground laboratory at night...

Tom's Navy SEAL team nicknamed him 'Tailspin', especially after sustaining his knee injury, but Joe likes to call him his 'Lucky Charm' -- saved his tail too many times to count.

To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.

To the RKO motion picture camera at her 100th birthday party: “I pray for the day when working men and women are able to earn a fair share of the wealth they produce in a capitalist system, a day when all Americans are able to enjoy the freedom, rights and opportunities guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States of America.” — Mother Jones

Troops are everywhere in their modern, digital camouflage, designed to blend in anywhere at any time. Yet at night we wear bright yellow reflective belts.

To where? We don't know. To do what? We don't know either. No one tells us anything. We just follow orders.

Veil wouldn’t make his military invincible, but it would render every other military indefensible. Veil was it. Game over, fuckholes.

Trying to drown me woman?" 'You can't drown a SEAL,' she said. 'How embarrassing would that be?' 'God yes. Shoot me, hang me, let me die of infection from a hangnail, but don't let me die in the water. They'd send me to hell on principle.

Turning back to the crowd I say, “I am duty bound to make this plea, but I want to say, with all due respect to the governor here, that I doubt seriously that he will do — cannot do — anything. And for the reason that he is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the capitalists who placed him here in this building.” — Mother Jones

Two guys jumped us on the way to get food," Cameron answered. "Ty is like... a ninja on crack. He beat them up pretty spectacularly. Then we stole with their car.

US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.

Verily, there is no dishonor in death at the hands of a far superior enemy.

Very few people in the USA realize that a nuclear war was waged with nature in the southwest by their own military.

Very few USA citizens realize that the USA corporate military is regarded by many to be both a domestic and international terrorist organization.

War?' The word held too much definition for three letters.

Was it really just an hour ago that he’d licked me into nirvana at the top of the hill? We’d been buying condoms and planning an afternoon of hot sex, and now we were on a witch-hunt. Seeking retribution. Out for blood.

War creates many strange juxtapositions, perhaps none stranger than this: men who are doing their utmost to kill other men can transform in a split second into lifesavers. Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously.

War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.

We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears.

We all lose people. We all have to live in the aftermath. It’s how we move forward that counts, but sometimes we are tethered to something in our past that won’t let us move forward.

We all cannot do everything or solve every issue. "It's impossible", however, if we each simply do our part. Make our own contribution, regardless of how small we may think it is.... together it adds up and great things get accomplished.

We could scan each car for terrorists and lovers she could lean into my camouflage her head resting on woven trees. When they come for her body she could run deep into my uniform into the forest of me where they could never find her.